Crossword-Solution: SORTITION 9 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 9

The existing system did not even make it possible to elect a man who would certainly have the conduct of the African war; and if we suppose that in this particular case the division of the consular provinces did not depend on the unadulterated use of the lot, but was settled by agreement or by a mock sortition,[994] the probity rather than the genius of Metellus must have determined the choice, for Silanus was assigned a task of far more vital importance to the welfare of Rome and Italy.

Presumably this is due to the growing importance of the Strategus and to the institution of sortition (see below), which, whether as cause or effect, is presumably by the 5th century indicative of diminished importance.

Now it is perfectly clear that it could not have been this object which impelled Solon to introduce sortition; for in his time the archonship was not open to the lower classes, and, therefore, election was more democratic than sortition, whereas later the case was reversed.

The changes by which the character of the Greek democracies was revolutionized were four in number: the substitution of sortition for election, the abolition of a property qualification, the payment of officials and the rise of a class of professional politicians.

Sortition had been instituted for election a generation earlier (487 B.C.).[16] What is perhaps the most important of all these changes, the rise of the demagogues, belongs to the era of the Peloponnesian War.